FOUR STARS ****

Anyone who has ever sat behind an office desk and felt a creeping, claustrophobic panic will find this little-known 1935 drama by J. B. Priestley painfully pertinent. Originally written for Ralph Richardson, it’s set in the Holborn offices of the aluminium importers Briggs and Murrison, a company in terminal decline during a period of recession in which, as the titular Jim Cornelius puts it, business has become “a game of snakes and ladders — but without the ladders”. The future is frighteningly uncertain; the reward for years of loyalty and for lives wasted in uninspiring toil is nothing beyond the final pay packet.

Sam Yates’s production is beautifully modulated and played to perfection, its atmosphere of deadening routine offset by the petty politics and personal quirks that characterise office life, now as then. As designed by David Woodhead, Briggs and Murrison is an outmoded, slightly shabby workplace, with its laboriously kept ledgers and creaky wooden furniture. The smoking chimney, the bane of Beverley Klein’s garrulous, bustling cleaner Mrs Roberts, hints that everything here is fit for little more than firewood.

With Murrison (Jamie Newall) out on the road desperately trying to drum up business, company partner Cornelius (Alan Cox), incongruously affable and witty in such mundane employment, is in charge. Lawrence (David Ellis), the frustrated office boy, longs for a job in the new technology of wireless and gramophone. The elderly cashier, Biddle (Col Farrell), is contemplating a move to the country. Strait-laced, poignantly plain Miss Porrin (Annabel Topham) lingers thanks to her unrequited love for Cornelius, and Miss Evison is a frequent absentee whose sparklingly pretty sister Judy (Emily Barber) turns up to take her place. She enchants Cornelius, leading him to nurse an ill-advised tendresse for her.

While catastrophe looms and creditors close in, the office is visited by a string of sales people trying to flog goods no one needs or can afford. It’s a bitterly funny and affecting cavalcade of human misery in the pitiless world of commerce; a late plot twist reveals just how devastating the consequences of failure can be. Piercingly relevant, compassionate and delivered, like Cornelius’s bons mots, with great style.

Sam Marlowe, 22/08/12